Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Five terrific novels about art and artists

At B&N Reads Jenny Shank tagged five top novels about art and artists, including:

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

In this novel that seamlessly weaves together historical and contemporary fiction, a writer named Marianne Wiggins (who has some biographical overlap with the author) has written a book about Edward Curtis, the famed photographer of Native Americans and other inhabitants of the old West. Some disturbing news about her wayward father sends her on a roadtrip and gets her meditating on the life of Curtis. A section of the book is told from the perspective of Curtis’s frequently abandoned wife, Clara. Clara remembers what her dad told her about artists: “Talent, her father used to say, is more abundant than you think. You have to have the temperament to tolerate hard work. You have to flirt with luck. You have to take the chances that most people wouldn’t take.”